William Robinson
William Robinson ( * 5 de julio 1838 - 17 de mayo 1935 ) fue un naturalista irlandés jardinero práctico, periodista cuyas ideas sobre los jardines silvestres empujaron el movimiento a favor del cottage garden inglés, en paralelo a la búsqueda de una simplicidad de buen gusto y honestidad para el estilo vernáculo del movimiento británico de Arts and Crafts.Clayton, p. xx. Robinson está acreditado como un practicante pionero de la mezcla de bordes de herbáceas con planta perennes, hacia un "jardín natural", que se uniría con el patrón de jardín victoriano de esquemas de plantacionesBetty Massingham, "William Robinson: A Portrait" Garden History 6'.1 (primavera 1978:61-85) p. 61. Sus nuevos puntos de vista paisajistas de Robinson ganaron popularidad a través de sus revistas y varios libros, particularmente ''The Wild Garden y The English Flower Garden. Robinson abogaba por plantaciones más naturales y menos formales, de perennes, arbustos, y enredaderas, y reaccionando contra la Alta Jardinería Victoriana, que usaba en demasía plantas tropicales crecidas en invernaderos. Estaba en contra de los rosedales estándar, estatuaria, jardines italianos, y otros artificios comunes en la jardinería de la época. Las prácticas de una jardinería moderna introducidas primero por Robinson incluía: uso de plantas alpinas en rocallas; densas plantaciones de perennes y cubreterreno para no expner suelo desnudo; uso de plantas perennes y nativas; y plantaciones bien extensas con carácter silvestre.Duthie, p. 12. Vida y carrera thumb|250px|"A Devonshire Cottage Garden, Old Ford, East London Robinson comienza su carrera de jardinería en la propiedad de un barón irlandés en Ballykilcannan, Sir Hunt Johnson-Walsh,Massingham 1978:61; further remarks based on the scanty documentation of Robinson's Irish years can be found in Ruth Duthie, "Some notes on William Robinson", Garden History '''2.3 (Summer 1974). y se lo pone a cargo de un importantee número de invernaderos a los 21. A resultas de una disputa, una fría noche de invierno de 1861, es echado, habiendo destruido valiosas plantas. Robinson se va a Dublín a la mañana siguiente, y con la influencia de David Moore, jefe del Jardín botánico de Glasnevin, y amigo de la familia, lo ayuda a encontrar trabajo en los Jardines Botánicos de Regent's Park, de Londres, haciéndose responsable de las plantas herbáceas, especializándose en las británicas.Massingham, p. 61. Para esa época, los Jardines de Kensington de la Royal Horticultural Society ya se estaban diseñando y plantando con vastas cantidades de florees de invernadero en plantaciones en masa. Robinson reflexiona que "no es difícil de entender que este es un "arte" falso y espantoso." Pero a su vez, esas obras con plantas nativas británicas le permitieron crear completamente distintos escenarios, pero con las mismas especies nativas.Massingham, p. 63. Escritos En 1866 deja Regent's Park para escribir para The Gardener's Chronicle y para el The Times, y representar a la firma líder en horticultura: Viveros Veitch en la Exposición Universal de París (1867). Es electo miembro de la Sociedad linneana de Londres a los 29, esponsoreado por Darwin, y arranca escribiendo muchas publicaciones: Gleanings from French Gardens, 1868}]; The Parks, Gardens, & Promenades of Paris, 1869; Alpine Flowers for Gardens, The Wild Garden, 1870. En 1871 lanza su propia Revista de Jardinería: The Garden, que con el tiempo incluiría contribuciones de notables como John Ruskin, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Gertrude Jekyll, William Morris, Dean Hole, Canon Ellacombe, James Britten.Massingham, p. 65. Sus más influyentes libros fueron The Wild Garden, que lo hizo reputado y le permitió comenzar ccon su Revista The Garden; y The English Flower Garden, 1883, que revisa de edición en edición e incluiía contribuciones de su amiga de años G. Jekyll, entre otros. Élla más tarde edita The Garden por un par de años y contribuye con muchos artículos a sus publicaciones, incluyendo Gardening Illustrated (de 1879). Él se encuentra primero con Jekyll en 1875, acordando en sus principios de diseño, y manteniendo una estrecha amistad y una asociación profesional por más de 50 años. Él la ayuda en su jardín de Munstead Wood; y es élla la proveedora de plantas para el jardín de Robinson, de Gravetye Manor. Jekyll escribe dee Robinson que: ...cuando la jardinería inglesa estaba representada por innatas futilidads del sistema "bedding", con sus vulgares repeticiones y coloreo inarmónimo, el Sr William Robinson elegía para sus obras los mismos tesoros que otros hacían yacer negligentemente. No cabe dudas que si hay alguien que ha clarificado el conocimiento sobre las plantas nativas silvestres, asegurando hoy que la "bedding manía" está virtualmente muerta.Massingham, p. 85. Robinson también publica God's Acre Beautiful or The Cemeteries of The Future, donde aplica su estética de jardinería a las parroquias y cementerios. Además hizo campaña para hacer notar las ventajas de la cremación frente al entierro.Massingham, p. 67. Gravetye Manor [[Archivo:Englishgarden.png|thumb|400px|"The Wild Garden: vista de Moat Mead, Gravetye Manor, con narcisos del poeta, en botones florales, principios deel verano de 1891, plantación de cinco años" de The English Flower Garden, sketch de W. E. Norton.]]Con su exitosa carrera de escritor, n 1884 Robinson fue capaz de adquirir la Elizabethan Manor de Gravetye, cerca de East Grinstead en Sussex, con cerca de ochenta ha de ricas pasturas y arboledas. Su registro de plantaciones y cuidados se publican como Gravetye Manor, or Twenty Years of the Work round an old Manor House (1911).Massingham, p. 71. Gravetye sería la demostración dee muchas ideas prácticas de Robinson acerca de un estilo más natural de jardinería. Luego comrparía más propiedad para llegar a 405 ha.Tankard, p. 1. Mucha de su propiedad fue manejada con un régimen de tala rasa, dándole a Robinson la oportunidad de plantar bloques de scilla, cyclamen, and narcissus between the coppiced hazels and chestnuts. On the edges, and in the cleared spaces in the woods, Robinson established plantings of Japanese anemone, lily, acanthus, and Pampas grass, along with shrubs such as fothergilla, stewartia, and nyssa. Closer to the house he had some flower beds; throughout he planted Red valerian, which he allowed to spread naturally around paving and staircases.Stuart, pp. 58-59. Robinson planted thousands of daffodils annually, including 100,000 narcissi planted along one of the lakes in 1897. Over the years he added hundreds of trees, some of them from American friends John Singer Sargent and Frederick Law Olmsted. Other features included an oval-shaped walled kitchen garden, a heather garden, and a water garden with one of the largest collections of water lilies in Europe.Tankard, p. 3. Robinson invited several well known painters to portray his own landscape artistry, including the English watercolourist Beatrice Parsons, the landscape and botanical painter Henry Moon, and Alfred Parsons. Moon and Alfred Parsons illustrated many of Robinson's works.Tankard, pp. 4-5. After Robinson's death, Gravetye Manor was left to the Forestry Commission, who left it derelict for many years. In 1958 it was leased to a restaurateur who refurbished the gardens, replacing some of the flower beds with lawn.Tankard, p. 5. Today, Gravetye Manor serves as a hotel and restaurant. Long-term impact on Gardening Through his magazines and books, Robinson challenged many gardening traditions and introduced new ideas that have become commonplace today. He is most linked with introducing the herbaceous border, which he referred to by the older name of 'mixed border'—it included a mixture of shrubs, hardy and half-hardy herbaceous plants. He also advocated dense plantings that left no bare soil, with the spaces between taller plants filled with what are now commonly called ground cover plants. Even his rose garden at Gravetye was filled with saxifrage between and under the roses. Following a visit to the Alps, Robinson wrote Alpine Flowers for Gardens, which for the first time showed how to use alpine plants in a designed rock garden. His most significant influence was the introduction of the idea of wild gardening, which first appeared in The Wild Garden and was futher developed in The English Flower Garden. The idea of introducing large drifts of native hardy perennial plants into meadow, woodand, and waterside is taken for granted today, but was revolutionary in Robinson's time. In the first edition, he happily used any plant that could be naturalized, including half-hardy perennials and natives from other parts of the world—thus Robinson's wild garden was not limited to locally native species. Robinson's own garden at Gravetye was planted on a large scale, but his wild garden idea could be realized in small yards, where the 'garden' is designed to appear to merge into the surrounding woodland or meadow. Robinson's ideas continue to influence gardeners and landscape architects today—from home and cottage gardens to large estate and public gardens.Duthie, p. 13. The Wild Garden, 1870 [[Archivo:Thewildgarden.png|thumb|250px|"Colonies of Poet's Narcissus and Broad Leaved Saxifrage" from The Wild Garden.]]In The Wild GardenThe Wild Garden: or the Naturalization and Natural Grouping of Hardy Exotic Plants with a Chapter on the Garden of British Wild Flowers was reprinted in 1983 (London: Century Publishing), with an introduction by Richard Mabey. Robinson set forth fresh gardening principles that expanded the idea of garden and introduced themes and techniques that are taken for granted today, notably that of "naturalised" plantings. Robinson's audience were not the owners of intensely gardened suburban plots, nor dwellers in gentrified country cottages seeking a nostalgic atmosphere; nor was Robinson concerned with the immediate surroundings of the English country house.The English Flower-Garden dealt with these garden areas. Robinson's wild garden brought the untidy edges, where garden blended into the larger landscape into the garden picture: meadow, water's edge, woodland edges and openings. The hardy plants Robinson endorsed were not all natives by any means: two chapters are devoted to the hardy plants from other temperate climate zones that were appropriate to naturalising schemes. The narcissus he preferred were the small, delicate ones from the Iberian peninsula. Meadowflowers included goldenrod and asters, rampant spreaders from North America long familiar in English gardens. Nor did Robinson's 'wild' approach refer to letting gardens return back to their natural state—he taught a specific gardening method and aesthetic. The nature of plants' habit of growth and their cultural preferences"Ecology" was not in Robinson's vocabulary. dictated the free design, in which human intervention was to be kept undetectable. Without being in any sense retrograde, Robinson's book brought attention back to the plants, which had been eclipsed since the decline of "gardenesque" plantings of the 1820s and 30s, during the use of tender annuals as massed color in patterned schemes of the mid-century. The book's popularity was largely due to Robinson's promise that wild gardening could be easy and beautiful; that the use of hardy perennials would be less expensive and offer more variety than the frequent mass planting of greenhouse annuals; and that it followed nature, which he considered the source of all true design.Wolschke-Bulmahn, p. 86. The book was dedicated to Robinson's friend S. Reynolds Hole, dean of Rochester, the "Dean Hole" of garden history, a connoisseur of hardy roses. The English Flower Garden, 1883 [[Archivo:Englishgarden2.jpg|thumb|400px|"Edge Hall, Malpas, Cheshire. Lawn garden with hardy flowers in beds and groups" from The English Flower Garden, engraving from a photograph.]]In The English Flower Garden, Robinson laid down the principles that revolutionised the art of gardening. Robinson's source of inspiration was the simple cottage garden, long neglected by the fashionable landscapists. In The English Flower Garden he rejected the artificial and the formal, specifically statuary, topiary, carpet bedding, and waterworks—comparing the modern garden to "the lifeless formality of wall-paper or carpet." The straight lines and form in many gardens were seen by Robinson to "carry the dead lines of the builder into the garden."Robinson, The English Flower Garden, p. 12. He admired nature's diversity, and promoted creepers and ramblers, smaller plantings of roses, herbaceous plants and bulbs, woodland plants, and winter flowers. Robinson compared gardening to art, and wrote in the first chapter: The gardener must follow the true artist, however modestly, in his respect for things as they are, in delight in natural form and beauty of flower and tree, if we are to be free from barren geometry, and if our gardens are ever to be true pictures....And as the artist's work is to see for us and preserve in pictures some of the beauty of landscape, tree, or flower, so the gardener's should be to keep for us as far as may be, in the fulness of their natural beauty, the living things themselves.Robinson, The English Flower Garden, p. 8. The first part of The English Flower Garden covered garden design, emphasizing an approach that was individual and not stereotypical: "the best kind of garden grows out of the situation, as the primrose grows out of a cool bank."Massingham, p. 69. The second part covered individual plants, hardy and half-hardy, showing artistic and natural use of each plant—with several articles included from The Garden and chapters contributed by leading gardeners of the day, including Gertrude Jekyll, who contributed the chapter on "Colour in the Flower Garden" This book was first published in 1883, with the last and definitive edition published in 1933. During Robinson's lifetime, the book found increasing popularity, with fifteen editions during his life. For fifty years, The English Flower Garden was considered a bible by many gardeners.The English Garden: A Social History By Charles Quest-Ritson Enlaces internos * Hoteles de plantas de jardín, en inglés Notas Referencias * * * * * * * * Enlaces externos * Google books Textos completos de las siguientes obras de Robinson están disponibles en Google books (el año muestra la fecha de publicación de una edición particular). * * * * * * * * Otras * History of Horticulture website: William Robinson * Archivos de Robinson en el Registro Nacional de Archivos del [[RU]] Wild Garden, The English Flower Garden, The Categoría:Miembros de la Sociedad linneana de Londres Categoría:Horticultores del Reino Unido Categoría:Jardineros Categoría:Paisajistas del Reino Unido Categoría:Bellas artes da:William Robinson en:William Robinson (gardener) ja:ウィリアム・ロビンソン (造園家)